Desire Bound: formation of a Malay minority agency in Singapore Yasuko Hassall Kobayashi May2006 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Australian National University Introduction This thesis is a history of Malays in Singapore. It will show how Malays have attempted to locate themselves in Singapore society since Singapore's independence, by tracing the formation of a certain Malay psychological agency. The chief source of data is the Malay language newspaper Berita Harian I Berita Minggu, while the last part of the thesis mainly uses fieldwork participation and observation. As a theoretical framework the study uses Lacan's notion of psychological agency as further developed by Slavoj Zizek and Ghassan Hage. The study shows how Malays are motivated by a desire to be accepted as part of mainstream Singapore society. This drives them to perform a patterned set of conducts: examining themselves critically, detecting flaws and setting those problems as targets for improvement. They do this by their own initiative and for their own good, without necessarily being aware that their discourses and conducts are reconfirming the mainstream ideologies. This casts a new light on the notion of minority agency. It is commonly presumed that minorities are a seed of conflict and therefore tend to displace the centrality of the majority. This thesis shows that a certain type of ethnic minority agency does not do so but is in fact complicit with the goals of the majority or power­ holders while acting for itself to attain its own goals. Chapter 1 firstly explains a personal connection between the writer and the research topic, and outlines the position of Malays in Singapore. It discusses how useful theories on nationalism and ethnicity are for examining these Malays, and explains the choice of theoretical framework for this study and choice of data sources. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 both focus on the period from 1965 to 1970. Chapter 2 examines how the majority or the power-holders tried to control the Malays in Singapore during this time, and where the Malays were located in independent Singapore under the new government. Chapter 3 examines a Malay response to the state's challenge to choose between the state-approved ideology of meritocracy, and the ideology of Bumiputra or affirmative action for Malays. It shows how firstly Malay MPs accepted the ideology of meritocracy as the path for Malays, and then other politically engaged Malays came to work together with the MPs, based on a common desire to be respected by the majority as equal Singaporeans. This led to a landmark seminar in 1970 at which it was declared that Malays in Singapore would transform themselves into an agency fit to perform meritocracy and thus to participate in nation-building. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 both examine Malay discourses and conduct in the 1970s. In Chapter 4, we see how Malay MPs decided to lead Malays to make themselves fit to perform by the logic of meritocracy like the other ethnic groups in Singapore. This gave rise to a set of Malay conducts for self-improvement under the slogan "Change Attitudes". Politically engaged Malays began to participate in this "Change Attitudes" campaign through a series of public seminars and through forums and discussions conducted in newspapers, while this campaign was also consumed by a broader audience of Malay newspaper readers. Chapter 5 examines "Change Attitudes" in the 1970s with respect to two issues, Malay education and attitudes of Malay women. Malay MPs, journalists, and leaders and members of organisations participated in this exemplary set of conducts, as a road to achieving their desire to become part of the Singapore mainstream. During this decade this campaign of self-improvement also became a way for Malays to obtain temporary satisfaction, by demonstrating measurable achievements that brought them closer to acceptance as decent Singaporeans. In Chapter 6 we see how the same Malay agency was a powerful force in the 1980s. By now the relevant Malay conducts of finding problems within oneself and setting them as targets for fixing seems largely reflexive, and is performed even without the impetus of the explicit slogan of "Change Attitudes". At the start of this decade the government pinpointed Malays as (still) lagging behind the other ethnic groups in the field of education, and politically engaged Malays responded to this with the massive self-help project of conceiving and forming the Educational Council Mendaki. 2 Chapter 7, in a departure from the historical approach and focus on newspaper data in earlier chapters, demonstrates how the Malay agency of "Change Attitudes" is still active in the 21st century. It examines a small and newly created volunteer organization, An­ Nisaa, which provides classes for Indonesian domestic workers. The origins and practices of An-Nisaa reveal how its Malay members sense the gaze of the non-Malay communities and take action to detect and remove any threat to their reputation as decent Singaporeans. It thus illustrates how the desire to be accepted as equal Singaporeans influences the conduct of some ordinary Malays in their everyday lives far beyond the realm of political mobilization. 3 Chapter 1 Background 1.1 Junction between the Malays in Singapore and myself When I was in Singapore, I was often asked by Singaporeans why I was working on Singapore. Or instead of this direct question, some people asked me in a sophisticated way why I am working on Singapore history, instead of Japanese history. And while I was conducting my field work, Malay Singaporeans often asked me if my husband was a Malay Singaporean. These questions reveal how our society has become polarized between the people who come to move more globally and the people who stay in their domestic sphere physically and psychologically, as a social effect of globalization well illustrated by Zygmunt Bauman. 1 To those who stay in their domestic sphere, what I was doing was rather peculiar. Why on earth does a non-Singaporean work on Singapore? If we push this notion a little further in a rather critical direction, their question can be this: can you really understand Singapore despite the fact that you are not Singaporean? In fact, this question was raised in various forms by Singaporeans at conferences when I presented papers, in terms of "You do not know anything about Singapore, because you are not Singaporean."2 These were actually good questions. They require me to show what is the relation between myself and Singapore, or in the case of this thesis, Malays in Singapore. The connection point between myself and Malays in Singapore is our similar location in our own society: as an included yet differentiated minority within it. I have long considered myself as belonging to such a minority in Japanese society. This was because of transnational movement of the global elites which began in the 1970s. My father happened to be one of these people who moved globally to seek jobs. I was born in Japan to Japanese parents. My father had already started his life as a young academic. His speciality was plant DNA- a new fringe area of research which 1 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the human consequences, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988. 2 Most strikingly, it was at the conference titled "Handing over the rei(g)ns: Civil society under Lee Hsien Loong" held at University of Wollongong on 21st October 2004. 4 was not even given a proper department in the university. Those who took the risk of researching in it were dumped into one room as a group of geeks who dared to do something inter-disciplinary. When he finished his PhD, predictably, it was not easy to find a job. This was when he began to think of living overseas to continue his research and feed his family. After living in several countries in continental Europe, we eventually settled in (then) West Berlin. West Berlin in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a peculiar place even in the eyes of an 8 year old child. I attended a local school. Perhaps because of its geo-political location as an island in a sea of socialism, with the Wall as a constant reminder of the border, my German classmates were intensely conscious of their identity as West Berliners and West Germans. I sometimes came across them talking about how proud · they were of West Berlin. My own identity was inevitably constructed against theirs. My yellow skin, black eyes and hair, and foreign accent made me aware that I was different from them. And instead of trying to be one of them, I adopted the strategy of claiming my authenticity as a "native" Japanese. I needed to present myself as "Japanese" to my classmates. My parents took a strong role in this, admonishing me often to remember I am not a Berliner, or a German, but Japanese. Once a week in Berlin I went to a supplementary Japanese school run by volunteer teachers, and I liked it very much because it had a lot of books written in Japanese about Japan. In particular, I loved the history books on Japan. And I was happy when I came across some lines which mentioned how aesthetically sensitive Japanese culture is, or how wonderful Japanese tradition is. I wanted to be as proud of Japan and being Japanese as my classmates were of Berlin and being West Berliners. And indeed, I was one of the proudest Japanese about Japan, even though the information and knowledge I had managed to obtain about it was often inaccurate or else distorted by me. 5 When I got back to Japan, my delusions were wretchedly tom apart.